I am fond of telling my first-year students that one of the most important things they will learn in law school, in addition to the law itself, is how to find relevant law. Ten years ago this meant mastering the intricacies of legal literature and becoming able to work with the hundreds of thousands of books that one can find in a major law library. Today, however, all that is changed.

Increasingly, much of what law students, lawyers and the general public want to find out about legal issues can be found on the Internet. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the Internet makes lawyers unnecessary, but the Internet does provide basic sources for legal information that can make the average person more informed about the law and a better consumer of professional legal services. Every so often, I devote a column to some Web sites that I think everybody ought to know about. Because sites change so often it is necessary to do this with some frequency. Today’s column is the latest in that line.

One of the most valuable Web sites for the law is the site of the Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute. This can be reached by going to www.law.cornell.edu and clicking on the icon for the Legal Information Institute. The Institute is operated by the Cornell Law School, and its purpose is to provide up to date information on a wide variety of legal issues.

For instance, the site contains the full text of a number of federal statutes as well as the text of recent important court opinions. There is an extensive topical directory and each topic, when chosen, provides key information on a specific area of the law. I find the current reports of important U.S. Supreme Court and other state and federal cases of particular benefit. If one were to go to this page today, one could obtain Judge Schiendlin’s opinion in United States v. Awadallah, the recent case in which a federal judge in New York released a man held as a material witness in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

Another Web site that I find both interesting and useful is the site maintained by the University of Pittsburgh School of Law known as Jurist. This site can be accessed at www.jurist.law.pitt.edu. This is a site designed primarily for law professors and law students, but there is much on it of interest to everyone.

The site has a section of current legal news which provides newspaper and other media accounts of important current legal issues and cases. There is also one feature that will be particularly useful to anyone thinking about applying to law school. The site has links to virtually every law school in the United States and to hundreds of law professors. Thus, in one site, one can link to and browse the site of virtually every law school one might be interested in.

The site also has a section of “law school news,” containing media reports of current news about American law schools. There are also sections on “world law” as well as a section containing links to law reviews and to a law dictionary.

A third site of special interest to folks over the age of 50 is operated right here by Kim Dayton and Molly Wood of the Kansas University law school. It can be reached at www.keln.org. The Kansas Elder Law Network (KELN) is designed to provide up-to-the-minute information for seniors on a wide variety of legal and other topics. It has extensive bibliographies on subjects of interest, forms and a variety of other materials. It is an extremely useful site for anyone who is elderly or works with the elderly.

These three sites are only a few of the many extremely useful sites related to law that can be found on the Internet today. Again, a word of warning is in order. One must careful to remember that the ability to find legal information is not a substitute for having the specialized knowledge and experience only a licensed lawyer has. On the other hand, there are often times when a person wants to find out something about the law when going to a lawyer is not necessary, such as understanding current news. For such purposes, Web-based legal sites can be helpful.

Mike Hoeflich is a professor in the Kansas University School of Law.